1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a picture image generation apparatus for generating parallax picture images and a method thereof, and a printed material production apparatus for producing printed material in accordance with the parallax picture images thus generated and a method thereof.
2. Related Art
Recently, such an image print providing system as disclosed in Japan Utility Patent No. 3014733 that can provide services from photographing to printing of the photographed image in the same spot is widely known.
Further, recently, a new system that can image and print not only a still picture image but also a motion picture and/or parallax images has been developed, thereby enabling to obtain printed material the image of which changes when the printed material is viewed from a different direction.
For example, there is such a service to provide a parallax picture image photograph as printed material using the lenticular technology, which includes,
“Torikkiri Konica 3D (Trade Name)” available with a three-eyes-lens equipped film and its print service from Konica Corp.;
“Kodak Snap Kids 3D (Trade Name)” available with a three-eyes-lens equipped film and its print service from Kodak Corp.;
“MIP (Motion Image Print) card (Trade Name)” synthesized with 6 images, and “UgoiTaro (Trade Name)” apparatus for producing the card, both developed by Matsushita Denki Sangyo K.K.;
“Chikyuya K.K.'s Internet Service” for accepting orders for the card produced by the above-mentioned “UgoiTaro (Trade Name)” on the internet;
“Motion Picture Card Auto Vendor” as business entertainment equipment from Matsushita Denki Sangyo K.K., available as a card comprising a plurality of continuous photographs of an object, and in which the object appears as if moving when viewed from a different angle.
Further, as a similar system, there is such one that produces printed material utilizing the holographic technology capable of rendering parallax images only in the horizontal direction, which includes, for example,
“Instant holographic portrait printing system” authored by Akira Shirakura, Nobuhiro Kihara and Shigeyuki Baba, and published in the Proceeding of SPIE, Vol. 3293, pp. 246–253, January 1998;
“Fast holographic portrait printing system” authored by N. Kihara, A. Shirakura, and S. Baba, and published in the 3-D Imaging Conference 1998, July 1998.
In addition to the above, there is another system for producing printed material capable of rendering parallax images in both of the horizontal and vertical directions, which includes, for example,
“Holographic 3-D printer using the Lipman holographic stereogram” proposed by Yamaguchi, Honda and Ohyama, at the 20th Imaging Engineering Conference, December 1989;
“High density recording with the holographic 3-D printer” proposed by Endo, Yamaguchi, Honda and Ohyama at the 23rd Imaging Engineering Conference, December 1992.
Such systems for producing the printed material using the parallax images described above are capable of producing printed material by displaying a plurality of still picture images as if a motion picture film, imaging a plurality of images of an object from different viewing points using a dedicated imaging apparatus, or producing a plurality of images as viewed from different viewing points using the computer graphics (CG).
Further, digital image handling equipment such as a digital still camera, digital video camera recorder and the like are also popular. With widespread of these equipments, a so-called panoramic image generation is enabled using a computer or the like that capable of processing picture images by inputting sequential images or panning images as picture image data and joining there between.
As software for generating the above-mentioned panoramic image, there are available, for example,
“PictureGear Version 4.0 (Trade Name)” and “PictureGear Version 5.0 (Trade Name)”, available from Sony Corp.;
“Reality Studio (Trade Name)” developed by “Live Picture Inc., USA” and available from “Live Picture Japan”;
“QuickTime VR Authoring Studio (Trade Name)” developed by “Apple Computer Inc., USA” and available from “Apple Computer K.K. Japan”; and
“Panorama Boutique Light (Trade Name)”, “Panorama Boutique Pro (Trade Name)” and “Tailing Boutique (Trade Name)” available from “Sanyo Denki K.K.”.